RICS July Survey: What a Steadier Market Means for Sellers

By Lisa Hayes · 13 August 2026

Here's the short version. The July 2026 RICS UK Residential Market Survey, published on 13 August, shows the housing market stopped getting worse but didn't get better. Surveyors still see more prices falling than rising, buyer demand is weak, and sales are sluggish. But two things quietly turned: the flood of new homes coming to market dried up, and for the first time since February, agents actually expect sales to pick up. If you're selling, that's a mixed blessing you can use.

What actually happened in July's RICS survey?

Every month the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors asks the estate agents and surveyors on the ground a simple question: are things going up or down? It reports the answers as a "net balance" — the share saying up, minus the share saying down. So -30% doesn't mean prices fell 30%. It means 30 percentage points more members saw prices falling than rising. It's a mood ring for the market, and it tends to move before the price indices do.

For July, the mood was still gloomy, but a shade less so than June. The headline house price balance came in at -30%, up from -32% the month before. New buyer enquiries sat at -28%, unchanged. Agreed sales were -30%, also unchanged. Read cold, that's a market treading water. Read against where it's been, it's a market that has stopped sinking. Back in March, buyer enquiries were running at -41%. In April, agreed sales hit -37%. Compared with the spring, July looks almost calm.

RICS chief economist Simon Rubinsohn didn't dress it up. "The housing market remains subdued, and while that is not usual over the summer months, it is clear from the RICS seasonally adjusted data that the combination of geopolitics, the domestic political climate and the cost of mortgage finance are continuing to weigh on sentiment," he said. His warning: the forward-looking numbers are still downbeat, and that's "not the sort of climate likely to encourage housebuilders to step on the gas."

So this isn't a recovery. It's a market that has run out of reasons to fall faster. That's a meaningful distinction if you're deciding whether to list now or wait. A market still in free-fall punishes anyone who sells into it. A market that has levelled off, even at a soft level, is one you can plan around — you can price to it, sell into it, and move on with reasonable confidence about where you stand. For most sellers, certainty about the ground beneath your feet is worth more than a forecast about which way prices drift next quarter.

Why "less bad" is the story that matters for sellers

It's tempting to skim past a survey where nothing moved much. Don't. The interesting numbers in July aren't the ones that stayed flat — they're the ones that changed direction underneath.

Here's the month-on-month picture in one place.

RICS net balance	June 2026	July 2026	What it tells you
House prices	-32%	-30%	Still falling in most areas, but marginally less widespread
New buyer enquiries	-28%	-28%	Demand stopped deteriorating
Agreed sales	-30%	-30%	Transactions flat, off the spring lows
New seller instructions	-23%	-4%	The big shift — far fewer new homes hitting the market
Sales expectations (12-month)	negative	+3%	First positive reading since February
Price expectations (3-month)	weak	-31%	Agents still expect small falls near term

The number that should make a seller sit up is -4% on new instructions, down from -23% in June. For most of this year the complaint has been the same: too many homes, not enough buyers. Rightmove reckons the number of properties for sale has been sitting near a 12-year high. That glut is exactly why prices have been soft — buyers had the pick of the market and no reason to rush.

In July that started to change. Fewer sellers came forward. If that holds, the balance of power tilts, slowly, back towards the people already on the market. As north London agent Jeremy Leaf put it, "fewer listings mean the relatively low number of proceedable buyers have less choice, which is slowly increasing the pace of decision making." That's the mechanism. Less competition on the shelf, quicker decisions from the buyers who are actually out there.

But he added the sting in the tail: "the market remains price sensitive so generating buyer traction remains challenging, particularly while uncertainty about possible mortgage rate increases continues." Translation: you can benefit from thinner competition, but only if your price is right. Get greedy and you'll still sit.

How does this square with the house price indices?

The RICS survey is sentiment. The indices are the receipts. And right now they're telling the same story: flat.

• £299,253average price, Lloyds (formerly Halifax) HPI, July
• +0.1%Lloyds annual growth — slowest since Nov 2023
• £277,542average price, Nationwide, July
• -1.0%Rightmove asking prices in July — biggest July fall in a decade

The Lloyds House Price Index — the one most people still call Halifax, renamed in July 2026 — had the average home effectively unchanged over the month, down a token £143. At £299,253 it's just 0.1% higher than a year ago. That's the weakest annual growth since November 2023. Nationwide tells a similar tale: £277,542 in July, with annual growth slowing to 1.8% from 2.2% in June. And Rightmove, which measures asking prices rather than sold prices, recorded a 1.0% drop in July — the sharpest July fall in ten years — with roughly a third of listed homes having already had their asking price cut, by an average of 7%.

The official figures sit slightly behind, but point the same way. The ONS/Land Registry UK House Price Index — the most complete measure, because it's built on actual completed sales — put the average home at £271,295 in May 2026, up 0.3% on April and 2.7% higher than a year earlier. It lags by a couple of months, so it's still catching up with the softness the timelier measures are already showing. But the shape is consistent across every source: growth has slowed to a crawl, and the days of 5% and 6% annual gains are firmly in the rear-view mirror.

Notice the gap between those numbers. Sold prices (Lloyds, Nationwide) are flat. Asking prices (Rightmove) are being slashed. That gap is the whole market in miniature: sellers who priced on last year's optimism are now discounting to meet reality. The ones who price sensibly from day one skip that painful markdown. If you want to understand what your own home is realistically worth today, our guide to how much your house is worth and our regularly updated house prices tracker are the place to start.

The regional picture: a genuinely two-speed market

"UK house prices" is a national average that hides two very different markets. July's survey made that plain.

The weakest readings, as they have been all year, came from London, the South East and the South West — the higher-priced, more mortgage-dependent parts of England, where affordability bites hardest and every extra half-point on a fixed rate knocks thousands off what buyers can borrow. London stands out as the region agents are least confident about over the next 12 months.

At the other end, Northern Ireland is still firmly in positive territory, with surveyors there reporting prices rising rather than falling. Scotland has had a good run, but the survey suggests its momentum is now flattening off. In plain terms:

Region	July direction	What sellers should note
Northern Ireland	Prices still rising	The clear outperformer; demand holding up
Scotland	Growth flattening	Strong recently, now cooling to the pack
Northern England / Midlands	Broadly steadier	Lower price points, less rate-sensitive
London, South East, South West	Weakest	Most discounting; price with real caution

The practical point: national headlines are close to useless for pricing your own home. A "flat" UK market can mean a rising one in Belfast and a soft one in Guildford. Anchor your expectations to your street, your postcode and what's actually gone under offer nearby in the last eight weeks — not to a figure on the ten o'clock news.

Why mortgages are still the handbrake

You can't read this survey without coming back to borrowing costs. Every agent quoted in it circled back to the same thing.

The Bank of England held the base rate at 3.75% on 30 July, its fifth hold in a row. And this wasn't a dovish hold. The Monetary Policy Committee split six to three — and the three dissenters wanted to raise rates to 4%, not cut them. With inflation still at 2.6%, above the 2% target, the Bank is in no hurry. The next decision lands on 17 September.

That caution feeds straight through to what you'll actually be offered. Average fixed rates have crept up, not down: roughly 5.63% on a two-year fix and 5.67% on a five-year, with the all-in average around 5.58%, up from about 5.42% a month earlier. A handful of lenders have trimmed selected products, but the direction of travel this summer has been gently upward. Tom Bill, head of UK residential research at Knight Frank, summed up the buyer's mindset neatly: "the backdrop is less volatile than last summer, but upwards pressure on mortgage rates and tax uncertainty are the familiar causes of hesitation among buyers, which means demand is improving but from a low base."

Rachel Springall of Moneyfacts pointed at the same nerves: soft buyer enquiries show "many buyers could be worried about making a large financial commitment right now or feel they need to delay their plans due to mortgage rate volatility." If some of the terms in all this — net balance, base rate, fixed versus tracker — are a blur, our plain-English property jargon explained guide untangles them.

What it means if you're thinking of selling

Let me be straight with you, because the spin around this survey will go two ways and both are half-wrong.

The optimists will seize on "sales expectations turned positive" and tell you the recovery is here. It isn't. A +3% balance for the next 12 months is the faintest of green shoots, and the near-term price expectation is still -31%. Agents expect small falls over the next three months. The doom-mongers, meanwhile, will point at "biggest July asking-price fall in a decade" and tell you to panic. That's wrong too — asking prices falling is largely over-optimistic sellers correcting, not the value of good, sensibly-priced homes collapsing.

The truth sits in the boring middle. This is a functioning market where the right home at the right price sells, and everything else lingers. Here's the honest ledger.

Put those together and the strategy writes itself. In a market like this, price is not a negotiating position you soften later. It's the single lever that decides whether you sell in six weeks or six months.

What to do now: a seller's playbook for late summer 2026

None of this is complicated. It just requires you to be honest with yourself about the market you're in, not the one you'd like.

Price to the last eight weeks, not last year. Ignore what your neighbour "got" in 2024. Look at what's gone under offer near you recently, and price to be the obvious-value option in your bracket. In a buyer's market, the home that looks like a deal is the one that gets viewings.

Get the valuation right first time. The Rightmove data is blunt about the cost of over-pricing: a third of sellers ended up cutting, by an average of 7%. A home that launches too high, sits, then discounts almost always ends up selling for less than one priced correctly from day one — because buyers read time-on-market as a red flag. A realistic starting figure is worth more than an ambitious one. Our valuation guide walks through how to sense-check an agent's number.

Know your real timeline. If you need certainty or speed — a chain to hold together, a job move, a probate sale, a divorce — the open market's "list and hope" isn't your only route. A cash house buyer trades a lower headline price for a fast, chain-free, guaranteed completion, and in a hesitant market that certainty has real value. It isn't for everyone, but it's worth understanding before you commit to months on the portals. Our guide to how to sell your house fast lays out the trade-offs plainly.

Prep the home properly. When buyers have choice and nerves, presentation does heavy lifting. Declutter, fix the obvious, get the photos and the EPC sorted before you list. Serious buyers are deciding faster — give them fewer reasons to hesitate.

Compare your options, don't assume. Estate agent, auction, cash buyer, part-exchange — each suits a different priority around price, speed and certainty. The mistake is picking one by default. Get more than one view of what your home is worth and how quickly each route would move.

What about the rental market and accidental landlords?

One part of the survey deserves a mention even if you're a straightforward owner-occupier, because it affects a lot of sellers who don't think of themselves as landlords. If you've been renting out a flat you couldn't sell, or you inherited a property and let it, you're in this market too.

RICS found tenant demand broadly flat over the three months to July, while new instructions from landlords kept falling, at a net balance of -27%. In plain English: fewer landlords are putting properties up to let, because more of them are getting out. The survey's members repeatedly flagged that some landlords are shrinking their portfolios or leaving the sector altogether, blaming tax, regulation and affordability. With supply tightening, 28% of surveyors expect rents to rise over the next three months.

Why does that matter to a seller? Because it changes the maths on "shall I just rent it out instead?" For years, letting was the easy fallback when a sale felt hard. That fallback is getting less attractive: higher borrowing costs on buy-to-let, more regulation, and the prospect of more tax scrutiny in the autumn Budget. If you've been sitting on a property as a reluctant landlord, this is a reasonable moment to reassess whether holding still makes sense — or whether a clean sale, even in a flat market, frees you from a headache that's only getting bigger. If speed and certainty matter more than squeezing the last few thousand out of the price, our guide to selling your house fast is worth a read.

Is this the bottom? The honest outlook

Probably not a dramatic turning point, but plausibly the start of a floor. The ingredients for stabilisation are quietly assembling: supply of new listings easing, demand no longer falling, agents' 12-month sales expectations back in positive territory, and a twelve-month price expectation of +4% nationally. That last figure matters — surveyors, on balance, think prices will be modestly higher a year from now, even as they expect small dips over the next quarter.

What could kill the recovery before it starts? Two things, and both are in the survey's subtext. First, mortgage rates. If the Bank holds through the autumn — or if the three MPC hawks win the argument and rates edge to 4% — the affordability squeeze that's capping offers gets no relief. Second, the autumn Budget. "Tax uncertainty" came up again and again from the agents quoted, and until buyers know what's coming, some will keep sitting on their hands. A market that's found its footing can still be knocked off balance.

For a seller, though, the takeaway is oddly reassuring. You don't need a boom to sell well. You need a functioning market where realistic pricing is rewarded — and that's exactly what July's survey describes. The homes moving right now are the ones priced for the market as it is. Be one of them.

If you're weighing up a sale this side of the Budget, the smartest first move costs nothing: find out what your home is genuinely worth today and compare your options side by side. Start your free valuation and see the offers before you decide.

Figures in this article are drawn from the RICS UK Residential Market Survey (July 2026, published 13 August), the Lloyds and Nationwide house price indices, Rightmove, and the Bank of England. Market conditions change; treat this as informed comment, not personal financial advice.